Cloudflare makes Cloudflare Workers generally available
Web security company Cloudflare announced the general availability of Cloudflare Workers, which enable developers to launch their code directly at the edge of the company’s global network.
Cloudflare announced Cloudflare Workers beta in September. The company said since then, customers in the beta have used Cloudflare Workers to run billions of edge computing tasks.
Multi-access edge computing is a way of extending cloud capabilities closer to the end user for applications that demand bandwidth and low latency. The technology has been championed as an effective way to manage the growing number of web-connected devices. The purpose of Cloudflare is to enable developers to deploy their code closer to the end-user in order to ensure applications run smoothly.
Before Cloudflare Workers, the company noted developers were limited to deploying code either at the front-end of a user’s device or the back-end in a central data center. Both options have challenges. The former can be difficult to update, while the latter can result in latency issues noted earlier. Cloudflare Workers are intended to provide developers with an alternative deployment option.
“Cloudflare Workers saves us a great deal of time,” said John Thompson, senior system administrator at MaxMind. “Managing bot traffic without Workers would consume valuable development and server resources that are better spent elsewhere.”
Cloudflare Workers run across Cloudflare’s 127-plus data centers around the globe. With CloudWorkers, developers can create JavaScript applications that run closer to the end user with the Service Worker API. Additionally, the code can be updated quickly without requiring the end-user to update the app. Cloudflare is charging developers 50 cents per one million tasks.
“Moving away from VCL and adopting Cloudflare Workers will allow us to do some creative routing that will let us deliver JavaScript to npm’s millions of users even faster than we do now,” said CJ Silverio, CTO of npm, Inc. “We will be building our next generation of services on Cloudflare’s platform and we get to do it in JavaScript!”
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